


Hiccups in the Halls

by Lohrendrell



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Attempt at horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Child Abuse, Child Death, Gen, Ghosts, Haunting, Sordid Saovine, some gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:06:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26755531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lohrendrell/pseuds/Lohrendrell
Summary: Kaer Morhen is alive.Not in the same way of the fairy tales they tell children, where sentient castles are always searching for well-behaved lads to offer shelter and share fresh gooseberries. Or in the way it is sung in lullabies, with mansions forever smelling of baking pies, warm and comfy with the imprints of a grandmother’s love. No. Kaer Morhen is alive out of sheer spite, brimming with the pain of the boys murdered in its walls. Boys too young to understand the reasons for the witcher trials, but old enough to discern and to resent the unfairness of it all.Kaer Morhen is filled with ghosts of the boys who came before him, and Vesemir is the only one who knows of this secret.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 28
Collections: Sordid Saovine - The Witcher Halloween Event





	Hiccups in the Halls

**Author's Note:**

> This is my contribution to Sordid Saovine. I've been interested in horror lately, but this is my very first attempt at writing this genre. I had this prompt in my head for a while already, and this was the perfect opportunity to write it down. I think it came up a little more whumpy than horror-y? But I liked it :D
> 
> I just realized this one also fits the first prompt for Witchertober, which is "Kaer Morhen".

Kaer Morhen is alive.

Not in the same way of the fairy tales they tell children, where sentient castles are always searching for well-behaved lads to offer shelter and share fresh gooseberries. Or in the way it is sung in lullabies, with mansions forever smelling of baking pies, warm and comfy with the imprints of a grandmother’s love. No. Kaer Morhen is alive out of sheer spite, brimming with the pain of the boys murdered in its walls. Boys too young to understand the reasons for the witcher trials, but old enough to discern and to resent the unfairness of it all.

Kaer Morhen is filled with ghosts of the boys who came before him, and Vesemir is the only one who knows of this secret.

.  
.

His mother dies in an invasion. They are from a small village, so insignificant it’s not even listed in maps. Their king wouldn’t even recognize it by name. The ruler of Holopole, though, who calls himself king and has a policy of purging anyone who disagrees with him, is not so neglectful. When his army crosses the Braa river, heading towards the next big city to settle frontiers, they stumble upon the little village. Holopole’s king’s orders are direct and simple.

The witcher who had been hired to deal with a werewolf finds him the following morning. There’s no coin left to serve as his payment, but there is a five-year-old boy sobbing over his mother’s bloody corpse, her guts spread on the floor from the chain mace wound. The boy doesn’t try to hide when he approaches, neither he tries to fight when he is picked up. He’s brave in the face of misery, the witcher notices, and collects him in replacement of coin.

.  
.

Vesemir is not his birth name. He doesn’t have the vocabulary yet to explain why he doesn’t want to reveal the witcher this, but when he’s being carried up the mountain, and the witcher slays a monster who tries to attack them, he has the sudden thought that it’s the only thing that’s left. It’s the only thing that’s his, the only thing from before, and he will cherish, the same way he will always cherish the memory of his mother.

The witcher is greeted by his brothers at the entrance of the castle. The boy is greeted by another boy, a translucent one, sputtering blood and gore when he sneers. It takes only a look for him to understand: the boy wants to hurt. Hurt him. Someone. Anyone.

When they ask him for his name, and threaten to beat him for it, the ghost hiccups a suggestion: “Vesemir,” he says, blood dripping from his mouth, through his chin, never actually hitting the floor.

“Vesemir,” he repeats, and the boy by his side laughs menacingly, as if he succeeded in hurting him.

.  
.

He tries to keep his real name close to his heart, the only thing he still has. He forgets his mother’s face in the span of two years; memories alone aren’t enough to guard him from the repeated beatings, the unrelentless training, the constant laughter of angry little boys who want to hurt him, someone, anyone.

There are dozens and dozens of them. He is lying in bed one night when one of them approaches—his first confirmation that they are aware, they can see him too. The boy looks straight at him with hollow eyes that bleed, red wetness falling down his face just like tears would. “It’s gonna get worse,” the boy tells him, hovering with his bloody face over the wrist Vesemir twisted earlier in fencing training.

Vesemir believes him, shudders, shuts his eyes.

His mother’s voice fades long before that episode. By the time he is to take the trials, he’s forgotten completely of his origins, but the names of the boys who haunt him are engraved in his memory.

.  
.

On his first week in Kaer Morhen, he successfully runs away from one of the trainers, and hides in an armory by one of the innumerable stairs of the keep. There is a boy with him, barely older than a toddler. His transluscentness is of a distinct shade of purple, his extremities scarred with frostbite. He didn’t even go to the trials before freezing to death.

Together, they weep and weep, and Vesemir thinks, for a moment, he can hear Vesemir—the other one—laughing just outside the armory.

.  
.

His mother could see them too. She taught him not to be afraid. She called them their friends from another realm. “Just like our friends from Ghelibol, but even further, where you can’t follow yet,” she used to say.

But the ones they used to see weren’t like these. They were just village people, sometimes a young maiden who passed away while delivering her first offspring, or an elder unhappy with the fact his life ended too soon, at ninety-two.

She never had to see what he sees: the bloody, sometimes maimed, always furious boys hovering and hiccuping in the halls of the castle, watching him, watching them, everyone. Waiting. And waiting, and waiting.

They smirk at Vesemir when his injuries from training are particularly bad. They snarl at the trainers as if they were wolves. They stand beside the grown witchers that arrive from the Path to spend the winter, staring at them forlornly, envious. They watch the pack eating their fill at supper. Sometimes, when they are in a particular mood, they cause mischief: dropping scalding soup in a witcher’s lap, opening the barn so that they animals can escape and freeze, hiding knives in the crack of walls, with their pointy ends at ankle height.

One of the boys winks at Vesemir one day, and two hours later, the dormitory of the trainers somehow is set on fire.

.  
.

They will kill him if he says something, he knows.

He’s not sure if he wants to say something.

They will laugh at him if he says anything.

There are no books in the library covering this kind of exorcism.

Some of the trainers deserve to die.

If he doesn’t survive his Trials, he will be one of them.

He can’t betray them.

He can’t be in the keep anymore. He will die, one way or another.

.  
.

One of the boys has half of his skull decapitated. It doesn’t look like the wound of a weapon. Rather, it looks like some sort of explosion, as if his skull got too big for his head.

Vesemir learns of the Trials shortly after noticing the injuries most of the boys carry.

The ghosts whisper to him at night, talking about the pain, the convulsions, the rotten stench of death and mutagens settling him. They tell him of how the Trials rip one’s body, tear it apart, picking up their best parts, the parts that make them human, only to throw it away. Nothing is left when they are sealed shut, nothing except rotten guck and inhuman assets, and if one survives, he’s no more what he could ever hope to be. A monstrosity. A mutant. A fearless killing machine.

Vesemir doesn’t believe in them at first. Until his first Autumn in Kaer Morhen.

The walls at the dormitory aren’t thick enough to muffle the screams coming from the laboratory. “It’s on purpose,” the ghosts hiccup, the way they always do when they are particularly angry. “They want to scare us. They want us to behave. They will kill us no matter what.”

Vesemir shuts his eyes, covers his ears with his hands. “You should kill them,” the ghosts say. “You should kill them all before they kill us.”

The Trial of Grasses is the first one in a long journey to become a witcher. It lasts three days and three nights. The screams start to dwindle by day two. As the long hours of suffering go on, more and more boys lay lifeless in the tables where the trials take place, while simultaneously hovering over their own bodies. Laughter and cries merge with the screams, then, and it’s unbearable.

It’s unbearable.

.  
.

There is a boy who doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t laugh, doesn’t cry, doesn’t try to convince Vesemir to hurt others. He doesn’t have arms or legs. His eyes are hollow, his mouth contorted, half open, as if half of him wants to wail, but the other half only wants to perish in silence. He likes to stay by the stairs next to the library, where it’s warmer in summer, and he almost never moves from there. Once, he tilts his head when spotting Vesemir and asks, “Why are you still here?”

.  
.

Yannick is the only one who is kind to him when he arrives. He is one of the older trainees, and he shows Vesemir where he can sleep, where he can clean his chamber pot, tells him of the supper protocols. He teaches him which trainers are bad and which ones are terrible, and thanks to him, Vesemir manages to avoid significant scarring until his fencing instructions really start. Yannick laughs a lot, despite the training, the beatings, and the cold.

One Autumn, Vesemir comes back from training on the third night of that year’s Trial of Grasses, only to find Yannick standing by the window. He is looking outside, not laughing anymore, but weeping. The back of his skull looks as if it melted, a cataract of blood and brain guck staining the back of his ripped t-shirt. It never stains the floor.

Yannick weeps all day, all night, for years. Eventually, Vesemir learns to sleep with those sounds.

.  
.

Every Autumn, new Trials take place.

Every Autumn, Kaer Morhen spurs with life. Vesemir can swear it tries to swallow all its inhabitants sometimes, and on those days, he prefers to sleep in the stables.

New ghosts appear every year. They don’t call him by his name anymore. They resent him for surviving. He’s one of the adults, now, in their eyes. He’s one of those who must suffer.

.  
.

Vesemir hates him.

He doesn’t know if it’s because he stole his name, or because Vesemir hates everything. He is always sneering maliciously, glassy eyes full of hatred, bloodied teeth spilling out blood every time he hiccups threats.

Vesemir tries to kill him once. With a pillow.

When it’s his time to face the Trials, Vesemir is by his side, hiccupping-whispering, “You’ll perish. You must. You won’t—” half sentences tainted with rage, almost indiscernible with all the manic desperation.

.  
.

Vesemir is not present when Kaer Morhen is sacked. He hears the news on the Path, and since he is the only Wolf still in Kaedwen, he arrives first to see the aftermath of the destruction.

The ghosts greet him with laughter. There are bodies sprawled all over the place: in the great hall, in the stables, in the kitchens, the dormitories. Piles and piles of maimed witchers, some headless, some gutless, pieces of arms and toes and legs abandoned all around the keep.

The smell of blood and remains of terror is the worst.

The ghosts laugh, and laugh, and laugh while Vesemir cleans up the mess. Their satisfaction is almost tangible. Even the boy with no arms and legs comes outside to see.

The remaining wolves winter in Kaer Morhen every year, but the keep is far from the lively place it used to be. Kaer Morhen is still alive, but now is out of sheer stubbornness of the boys who were once murdered in its walls, who wished and claimed and cursed for revenge, who didn’t stop the humans and the mages when they invaded, who watched the crumbling of the School of the Wolf with menacing sneers, who laughed and laughed and laughed when the last of Kaer Morhen’s victims dealt with the aftermath of the bloodshed.

The other wolves go back to the Path every spring. Vesemir stays. He’s collected a lot of books on exorcism through the years. They are hidden at the back of the library, and he needs to start reading them.

Kaer Morhen is alive with the dead that walk inside its walls. Vesemir is alive and dead inside. He stays with them, where he belongs.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments put a smile on my face ^-^


End file.
